In 1968, the manga monthly Garo published a highly
successful special issue featuring the work of Tsuge Yoshiharu (b.
1937). Far from reveling in his growing popularity, however, the
artist quite literally tried to run away from it. Faced with his
own commercial success, this painfully shy man felt tremendous
angst, eventually deciding in September of that year to drop
everything and flee to Kyushu. There he intended to lead a new,
anonymous life with a female fan whom he knew only through the
letters they had exchanged. Perhaps predictably, this plan fell
apart after a mere two weeks, and Tsuge returned to Tokyo, where he
spent much of 1969 on hiatus, working only as an assistant to
another manga artist. Nonetheless, Tsuge's escape attempt reveals
the degree to which this artist struggled—both in his life and his
work—to secure a place for himself in a radically transforming
society.

The early death of his biological father and his mother's
remarriage to an abusive man contributed to the conditions of
extreme poverty in which he grew up during the years of the
Asia-Pacific War and the immediate postwar. In fact, to support his
family, he began working odd jobs in his early teens, eventually
missing his entire middle school education. By his late teens,
Tsuge had found his calling: drawing manga allowed him to use his
artistic talent and to work alone, a boon for a man who found all
contact with others painful. In 1955, Tsuge made his debut as a
freelance artist for rental manga books. Although he published
numerous works over the following decade, he continued to struggle
financially, occasionally even selling his blood at a blood bank
just to survive.

Meanwhile the medium of manga was undergoing a drastic
transition. In the early 1960s, the market for rental manga books
began to collapse as weekly publications rapidly expanded their
readership. As a result the manga art form, once deemed marginal
and insignificant, gained a new legitimacy. Some authors adjusted
to the changing market and made considerable commercial gains.
Tsuge, however, took a different path. In 1965, after giving up his
own career as a rental manga author, Tsuge began working as an
assistant to manga artist Mizuki Shigeru, publishing his own short
pieces in his spare time. Rejecting the larger and hence more
lucrative market of the weeklies, he chose Garo, a
monthly magazine more open to experimental works, as the main
medium for his art. There he found a niche, albeit temporarily,
and, with a score of highly acclaimed short pieces that appeared
from 1965 to 1968, Tsuge finally attained financial stability even
as he expanded the boundaries of manga expression.

However, Tsuge did not feel completely comfortable with his own
success, for it forced him to climb out of the social class to
which he was accustomed. While benefiting from financial stability,
he tried hard to adhere to his working-class identity, rejecting
the pretense of being what he felt he was not. In the second half
of the 1960s, his search for his lost identity in the midst of
financial success led him to various locations in Japan: he sought
an environment where he could capture the shadows of the
disappearing past. By deliberately staying at shabby inns, he
indulged in the fantasy that he was a castaway in postwar society.
The comfort that he found in these experiences, he later claimed,
satisfied his desire for self-denial. Tsuge's works that are based
on his trips strongly suggest that he sought a piece of the past
that he had lost. The shabby inns were attractive precisely because
they offered him a life for which he felt a strong affinity.
Echoing this experience, his stories from the second half of the
1960s are often set in rustic locales that have been left behind by
the economic growth of contemporary Japan and feature protagonists
who arrive at an unspecified location in the country as if to
reconfirm their affinity with the fast-disappearing world of rural
Japan. Yet, just as Tsuge in real life realized the impossibility
of living his fantasy, the protagonists in his fiction are
invariably aware of...

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